Steam sales advice

Hey!I have some questions for people that have games on Steam, would appreciate any advice :)

- There is a main Steam sale in about 2 months. Do we need to get "picked" to be a part of that, or do we just set a sale price for that time once the actual date is given to us?- Tons of titles go on sale during the main Steam sale, can we expect any increase of traffic at all to our Steam page during that time from Steam itself?- Can I run a sale at-will anytime, and are there any downsides that aren't obvious?- If I run a special now, it doesn't stop me from running another during the main sale right?

Basically, I'm trying to convert some of our wishlisted people (7000 wishlists, Steam average conversion is around 15%, we are currently way under that), and trying to get more people to our store page that haven't seen the game before.I don't know if sales are the way to do it, but right now we're getting almost no traffic straight from Steam, so I'm hoping it'll help a little bit.

Comments

[-]You only need to get picked for the themed sales, like Halloween or whatever, Steam mass sales anyone can participate, you just need to join the sale by committing to a discount. Steam will send you an email closer to the date of the sale.[-]My games are really low volume, but there is an increase of sales during the the sales period.[-]You can run a sale whenever you want, however there is a ~30 (not entirely sure) day cool-off for sales and price changes.[-]To do a visibility round you need to update the game, not 100% sure, but a visibility round might be required to do a normal sale.[-]Not sure if the cool-down of a normal sale will contradict with a Steam season sale, iirc if your normal sale overlaps the Steam sale, then there is an issue.

What you want to do is run visibility rounds as often as possible, Steam will get you around 500k views per visibility round.

What you want to do is run visibility rounds as often as possible, Steam will get you around 500k views per visibility round.

This seems to no longer be true according to what I've read and experienced. When last did you do it?I've done one visibility round, and it got 28k views, 473 clicks - so literally made no difference.In total we've had less than 100k lifetime views to the Steam page, the highest source of which is external links to the page (pointing to Steam barely bringing any visitors to the page itself).

It was a while ago since my last visibility round, so it might have changed.

In my brief experience, I would suggest not to do more than 15% for a discount, it's anecdotal but you signal the end of the game lifespan with higher discounts. Some people have your game on their wish list for extended periods of time and are waiting for higher discounts, if they skip a 50% they will wait indefinitely for another 50%. I do 10% for normal sales and 15% for Steam mass sales.

Might be a bit late, but you will receive an email stating that sales are coming up and if you would like to participate, log in to your partner account and enter your percentages for the sale. Sometime it is a sale at a time but near the end of the year you actually enter your percentages for 3 sales at the same time.

As stated above, you will receive a similar email for themed sales, this are pretty tough to get added to ... but you might stand a chance.

Typically they say don't go more then 30% on your first sale, as it can devalue your title too much, Steam does provide some assistance on the Sales page and you can look at that for advice or just go your own way.

Alright, been selling for a year and a half, here's what I can say based on my experience.

- There is a main Steam sale in about 2 months. Do we need to get "picked" to be a part of that, or do we just set a sale price for that time once the actual date is given to us?

The only sale you get 'picked' for is the daily deal. That you can't setup yourself, valve invites you to run it.

For the weeklong or custom sales, you set those up yourself using the backend, and you can do them no more than once every 8 weeks, plus there's a restriction of about a month after a permanent price change of your product.

The seasonal sales aren't subject to any of those timing delays. You can do you "once every 8 weeks" weekly sale, then the next day be part of the winter sale or xmas sale or whatever.

The Halloween sale used to have a restriction that you needed to do a Halloween themed update to participate. It didn't seem like that was a requirement last time, they might have dropped it. Xmas, summer etc have no restrictions like that.

- Tons of titles go on sale during the main Steam sale, can we expect any increase of traffic at all to our Steam page during that time from Steam itself?

Almost certainly.

Note - Tons of games are on sale at any point in time, now. For example, when I'm in a weekly sale, I can see 200 pages of other games on sale at the same, and my game is on page 20.

That doesn't change the fact that my revenue in months with sales in them is 2x-4x higher. My best sales month ever (excluding release month) was a month with a weekly sale and the halloween sale in it.

Sales are my primary source of income, now that my game has settled into the long tail.

Because of sales, I had 4 of my best months in a row recently, more than a year after my game's release. Which is rather nice. And not only that, your wishlist will go up.

To help this effect, and sales in general, make sure your game is tagged properly. Use every tag you can think of.

Also, don't be too cautious with the discount value, 10% won't sway too many people. Think about yourself as a gamer, how you'd see it. If a game is kinda interesting but doesn't seem worth buying at $10, would a $9 price point sway you? Probably not, right?

I didn't see a huge boost in sales until I started hitting around 40% discount. I think that's the line where people who've been on the fence are convinced that it's a good deal and they need to grab it. But I still would recommend experimenting. You can run an experiment every 8 weeks, so be patient. Try 20%, 30%, 40%. See what happens.

- Can I run a sale at-will anytime, and are there any downsides that aren't obvious?

Every 8 weeks.

A downside - for the week or so after your discount run, your normal sales will probably dive. Makes sense, right, everyone who would have converted from a wishlist did so during the sale.

But discounts, even 50% off, don't seem to hurt your normal sales in the long term, so don't stress about it. Definitely run your discounts whenever you can.

- If I run a special now, it doesn't stop me from running another during the main sale right?

See above.

Visibility rounds

This has changed. It used to be that you'd get 500k guaranteed impressions on the front page, just like how you used to get 1 mill guaranteed impressions on release.

Now, what it does, is show the game to people on your wishlist more for like 30 days. What this is for is marketing major updates/dlc. Don't try to run a visibility round unless you have a decent update (interesting content, not just a patch) or it'll do jack to sell people who weren't already sold.